Beauty, Mercy, Justice

How Many People…

…can read this story and not make any connection between what Stalin was up to and current schemes to use genetic engineering to perfect the human race?

I love the USA, but it often seems like there is some kind of race going on between evangelization and techno-paganism here, and that if Christianity loses the consequences are going to be pretty dire for the whole world.

—Maclin Horton

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5 Responses

What piece of “Christianity” would it be that “loses”? There is already a fair majority of folks who go by that name that have (mindlessly or otherwise) bowed at the Materialist Altar and signaled unqualified devotion to the Utilitarian & Economic Ethos. I certainly hope for faith-filled reason, but failing that we may take some comfort from the spectacular success of militant Islam in fighting off the modernist scourge.

Why, that would be the genuine piece, of course–the piece that believes the faith of the Apostles, and which even as we speak is coalescing in the Catholic and Orthodox churches.

I don’t really think militant Islam is going to succeed at fighting off the modernist scourge. I’m inclined to think that over a period of decades it will be split between a brutal Islamofacism, which can only succeed by a level of violent repression that typically can’t be maintained for very long (in historical terms), and indifferentism.

I appreciate your optimism Maclin. Really. I recently left what I deemed an increasingly materialistic and utilitarian branch of Christianity (viz., Mainstream Evangelicalism) for Rome. But I have found, much to my surprise (and horror) that there is a disconcerting “unevenness” (looks an awful lot like liberal protestantism to the “outsider”) even here. This may be coloring my judgement a bit.

Seriously, things have improved, overall, since, say, the 1970s, at least to the extent that the liberal Protestantism you’re referring to is in retreat. Perhaps a more serious problem is a kind of practicing apostasy in the pews.

I wouldn’t say I’m optimistic. I usually describe myself as hopeful but not optimistic. I do think that orthodox Christianity has a better shot at resisting the pathologies of the modern age than does Islam, because o.C. has the ability to absorb what’s good in it without being terminally poisoned by what’s bad. More of a shot at doing so than does Islam, anyway, in my opinion.

Stalin’s favored scientists despised genetics as bourgeois nonsense, and that Russian genetics fell into serious disarray as a result. We can be thankful for that, given how someone as bloodthirsty and ruthless as Stalin would have been in the use of genetic engineering…